6 ms·
Actually, it might be occasionally possible. Not perfectly, of course. If the input space is limited and you have other constraints on it, then you might be abl
by sz4kerto 6y ago
Actually, it might be occasionally possible. Not perfectly, of course. If the input space is limited and you have other constraints on it, then you might be able to find the original text. For example, let's say your input is a 280 character long tweet, the hash is only 16 bytes long.
If you find that "I AM A STABLE GENIUS" is one of the inputs that hashes to the given hash value, then you can be reasonably sure that this was the original text, given that most of the other inputs with the same hash won't be meaningful English sentences.
- talaketu 6y agoI'd say the count of believable English tweets would be many orders of magnitude greater the count of 16 byte hashes, so in general we can't just find a believable tweet and declare that we found the plaintext. There would be many possible collision. The phrase you mentioned is notable (with a slight edit) - so I suppose you mean you could index phrases by notability, then it may be tractable find tweets of notable phrases, since the number of notable phrases is relatively low.